Spanish Vocabulary A1: Learn the 260 Most Spoken Words (and Clean Up the Deck)

Deck AT7413, "Spanish Vocabulary A1 — Essentials" (260 cards), opens the same Flip It series as the A2 and B1 decks. Like them, it is a frequency list taken from film and TV subtitles. That is good news for A1: the first 100 words of spoken Spanish make up a big share of everything you will hear. To get that benefit, you need to know how the list was built.

Sample cards

What you will learn

Articles and contractions: el, la, los, las, un, una, del, al. Pronouns: yo, tú, él, ella, usted, nosotros, ellos, me, te, se, lo, le, les, nos, ti, mí. Connectors: y, o, pero, porque, cuando, si, como, entonces, también, sin, hasta, desde, después, antes. Core nouns: casa, vida, día, noche, mundo, dinero, trabajo, gente, padre, madre, hijo, amigo, mujer, hombre, nombre. Only three numbers appear (uno, dos, tres). There are no colours and no food words. That gap is normal for a list built from subtitles.

Three things to fix first

1. Cards 97-123 are a replay. They repeat the opening block with slashes squeezed together: de, no, lo, un, por, una, se, para, bien, su, como, le, todo, así, hay, tú, nos, hacer, fue, todos, son, creo, puede, entonces, casa, tan, sus. Suspend all 27, so the deck drops to 233 cards with nothing lost.

2. Verb forms are scattered. Tener is split across seven cards (tengo, tienes, tiene, tenemos, tienen, tenía, tener). Estar is split across six (estoy, estás, está, estamos, estaba, estado). Haber has six as well (he, ha, han, hay, había, haber). Add one present-tense table card for each verb and study it before the single forms. Card 8 (es) and card 21 (está) both translate as "is". Turn them into a ser/estar contrast card: es for identity and traits, está for location and states.

3. Fragments and noise. The extractor kept only one word of some fixed phrases. acuerdo is really de acuerdo (OK), and favor is por favor. Rewrite those backs with the full phrase. oh and eh are not vocabulary, so delete them. Card 73 writes sólo, but since 2010 the RAE recommends solo with no accent, which makes card 88 the correct one. vez means "time" as in una vez (once), not clock time (tiempo, hora).

Study tips for this deck

• Learn the accent pairs together. si/sí, tu/tú, el/él, mi/mí and que/qué are all in the deck. A written accent changes the meaning, so put each pair on one card instead of drilling them apart.
• Mark the Spain-only words. vale is everyday speech in Spain. In Latin America you will hear está bien or dale instead. Note this in the hint field, since all 260 hints are empty.

Find the deck in the Flip It library by its code AT7413 at flip-it.app. Next in the series, with the same fixes: Spanish Vocabulary A2 — 300 everyday words.